In the spring of 2023, I had the opportunity to explore various aspects of the 3D pipeline by creating a short 3D animation in Autodesk Maya. My goal was to produce a 5-10 second clip featuring a simple character I designed, interacting with an object.
This involved modeling and rigging the character, UV mapping both the character and the object, adding textures, and incorporating basic outdoor lighting. If time allowed, I planned to create a simple environment to avoid making the models look like they're floating in space.
Model and UV Mapping
I started with a turnaround sheet for my seagull character, Bagel, to make modeling easier followed by a quick storyboard to mark the key poses I wanted to animate. Bagel’s model was pretty straightforward and the donut model was a reused asset from my original Bagel model attempt.
UV mapping initially seemed manageable, but when I tried adding color gradation, the UV map didn’t align properly, leading to noticeable transitions. After tedious editing, I made the weird gradation transition less noticeable.
Rigging
Rigging posed its own challenges. I started with the body, hesitant to tackle the wings. I had a lot of trouble with the legs, especially with the IK handles causing the knees to scrunch the model oddly. I had issues with the eyes sinking into the head, later realizing that they required joints connected to the head joint. I later added another joint and control to Bagel’s neck so he could reach further down to the donut. The wings required a lot of trial and error; I ultimately used three joints with controls that could rotate out to simulate flight.
Once the joints and controls were in place, I ran a test animation of the character jumping to ensure the rig functioned as intended.
Animation
My main focus then shifted to blocking out the animation. Timing was challenging, especially without audio or music, but I managed to get a rough approximation of what I was going for and then changed most of the stepped tangents to spline.
From there, it was a lot of touch ups in many areas like the footsteps and their timing, wing movement, addition of blend shapes for a blink animation, addition of a donut constraint to attach it to Bagel, and tweaking camera movement.
Wrapping it Up
Alongside the animation, I created a simple environment featuring a boardwalk, a skydome light resembling a beach sky, and an ocean on the horizon.
After final tweaks to the animation and render view, I set up a mini render farm in one of my college’s computer labs to speed up the rendering process.
Finally, in After Effects, I compiled the frames, adjusted colors, and added sound effects to complete the scene.
